Page:The Soft Side (New York, The Macmillan Company, 1900).djvu/133

Rh He made an eager movement. 'Do you mean then we can talk?'

She just visibly hesitated. 'He and I only want to be kind to you.'

'That's just what's awful!' He fell back again. 'It's the way he has kept me on and on. I mean without' But he had another drop.

'Without what?'

Poor Braddle at last sprang up. 'Do you mind my being in a horrible fidget and floundering about the room?'

She demurred, but without gravity. 'Not if you don't again knock over the lamp. Do you remember the day you did that at Brighton?'

With his ambiguous frown at her he stopped short. 'Yes, and how even that didn't move you.'

'Well, don't presume on it again!' she laughed.

'You mean it might move you this time?' he went on.

'No; I mean that as I've now got better lamps!'

He roamed there among her decent frugalities and, as regarded other matters as well as lamps, noted once more—as he had done on other occasions—the extreme moderation of the improvement. He had rather imagined on Chilver's part more margin. Then at last suddenly, with an effect of irrelevance: 'Why don't people, as you say, come to you?'

'That's the kind of thing,' she smiled, 'you used to ask so much.'

'Oh, too much, of course, and it's absurd my still wanting to know. It's none of my business; but, you know, nothing is if you come to that. It's your extraordinary kindness—the way you give me my head—that puts me up to things. Only you're trying the impossible—you can't keep me on. I mean without—well, what I spoke of just now. Do you mind my bringing it bang out like a brute?' he continued, stopping before her again. 'Isn't it a question of either really taking me in or quite leaving me out?' As she had nothing, however, at first, for